WRONG NUMBER | NIKI

20 - Just Another Girl

NIKI'S POV

I tell myself I don't think about Hana that much, which is an impressive lie considering she has somehow managed to move into my head without paying rent and rearrange everything I thought was already in order. 

It's been a week. Seven days, maybe more, depending on which moment I decide was actually the beginning of this whole mess, and somehow I know things about her that I shouldn't know yet. I know she presses the tip of her pen against her bottom lip when she's stuck on a problem. I know she rereads the same paragraph when she's distracted, because her eyes keep moving while her mind is somewhere else. I know she hates being interrupted when she's studying, hates being told what to do even more, and has this particular little crease between her eyebrows whenever she's trying very hard not to say something she's thinking. 

I know she pretends she's calmer than she is. I know she says I'm fine in at least three different ways, and I can somehow tell which one means leave me alone and which one means please don't ask me again because I might actually tell you. I know she gets irritated when I tease her, but she tries not to smile, and I know she fails. 

I know her eyes are beautiful, which is a completely unnecessary observation that my brain seems determined to make every time I look at her. They're not just pretty in the obvious way, either. They're expressive in a way that makes lying around her difficult because whatever she doesn't say seems to collect there instead. Sometimes they're bright enough to make me forget what I was about to say, like sunlight catching on glass, and other times they're so quiet that I have the ridiculous urge to ask her what happened even when she hasn't said anything happened at all. 

She's like a shot of espresso disguised as a glass of water, small, composed, deceptively harmless until she hits your system and suddenly you're awake enough to question every decision you've made since breakfast. She's stubborn. She's infuriating. She's too serious about things that don't deserve seriousness and somehow not serious enough about the things that do. 

She studies when she's upset. She organizes when she's overwhelmed. She tries to solve people the way she solves equations, as though if she looks at every variable long enough, eventually everything will make sense. And the worst part is that I recognize it because I do the same thing. Just differently.

That's the part I don't know what to do with. Hana and I shouldn't be similar. On paper, we make no sense. She's careful where I'm reckless, quiet where I'm loud, disciplined where I tend to improvise my way through things, and somehow she manages to make even her silence feel organized. But underneath all of that, there's something almost painfully familiar about her. We both know what it's like to have someone else draw a map of our lives and then call it an opportunity. We both know how to smile when we want to argue. We both know how to say it's fine when it isn't. 

Maybe that's why I noticed her so quickly. Maybe that's why I couldn't walk away from the pool when I saw her there, or why I didn't think twice before stepping between her and those idiots at the festival. 

I keep telling myself it was because I knew what they were capable of, because I used to be one of them, because I know exactly how ugly things can become when people like that realize nobody is going to stop them. That's true. All of it is true. But it isn't the whole truth, and that's the part I don't like admitting even to myself. 

I saw Hana being cornered and something in me reacted before I had time to think. I saw her on the ground in the garden and forgot about my father, London, the argument, everything. I saw the fear on her face and suddenly nothing else mattered. And now she thinks I'm stalking her. Great. Fantastic. Exactly the reputation I needed. I almost laugh at the memory, but the laugh dies before it reaches my mouth because I remember the way she looked at me when she asked if I liked her.